BCFA – Brocade Certified Fabric Administrator 16G Beta

I am currently going for the BCFP – fabric professional – exam, but I did the BCFA 6 months ago so I’ll re-read the material and of course there’s the new stuff with FOS 7, new hardware, 16g, new ASIC that I should probably learn as well.

Some new stuff

‘fabric name’ is a new feature. But this is also more usable in VF – which is not part of BCFA. Firmware upgrades are the same (phew).
DCFM is now called Network Advisor and it also has IP/routing and MPLS functionality now.
Of course the 16G blades (with the first 8 ports capable of handling 10GB FC) and the FC10-6 blades.
D_port diagnostics (set a port to this before joining it to a trunk, or use it to measure distance on a long distance link, is accurate up to 5m).
IDLE/ARB fill words are no longer necessary to configure (except on 8G platforms and not on Condor3).
Condor3 is the new ASIC for the 16G blades.
New/larger/longer/better ICL between the new directors that use QSFP instead of the crap max 2m copper cable.

Kindle

One thing that’s great about the kindle is that you can put the Brocade material on it (even in PDF) – just change viewing mode to landscape/horizontal and it will look great. Two pages per slide. I still have material from my old so that one works. But the material that is given for free now has 0 access rights so it does not work on the Kindle.

The way I write my personal notes is: write them off from the brocade material in my own words.

I do this on google docs.

I then download it into .doc and then

e-mail it as an attachment to youraccount@free.kindle.com.

Then next time you hook up your kindle to wifi it will download the documents, converted to .azw.

What’s important here is to not use lists, as the conversion from a google doc saved as word and then e-mailed to youraccount@free.kindle.com does not like lists, it only takes the first level in the list.

I instead used headers, lost of them.

This is also nice because you can put a TOC which is clickable on the kindle.

Glad you liked it. I will let you know :)
The BCFP is a lot more for me to study, with the BCFA I got lots of good experience from working with the SAN-switches at HP and troubleshooting them.
This one is more concerned with stuff that not so many use/called us about like the FC routing, FCIP, Virtual Fabrics adn stuff like that.
Possibly because not so many used them and also because probably there weren’t that many problems with them after they were set up.